The Goodly Priest Gordon

Aberdeen's Catholics did not fare very well after the Reformation; not only were all the monastic orders based in the Green and Schoolhill chased out of the city, and great vandalism was done to all Catholic churches including St. Machar's and St Nicholas, but a Trinitarian monk, Brother Francis, was murdered by the vicious mob who set fire to his church and left his beaten body to be consumed by the flames.  It was no surprise then that masses and other episcopal duties were performed out of sight of Protestants in the houses of Catholic noblemen like Thomas Menzies of Pitfodels who owned a great stone dwelling in the Castlegate.

In 1771, the Roman Church's fortunes were to change for the better - Bishop James Grant was able to persuade William Young, a staunch Catholic and local merchant to bid for the derelict property of the Smiths of Inveramsay in Justice Street, off the Castlegate.  Formerly known as Skipper Scott's Close, after a prominent sea captain who was also a Jacobite supporter and 'out' in the 'Fifteen' with the Old Pretender, James III, it had been used as a lodging house and 'gin land' by the tenants of Inveramsay Court.  Young was pleased to help, and the Bishop able to move into his new lodgings once the old property was demolished in 1774.

By the end of the 18th century, Aberdeen had already lost two bishops to old age, Bishops John Geddes and John Gordon, the latter being one of two of Bishop Geddes' nephews.  The other nephew, ordained as a priest just five years earlier, was Charles Gordon.  It was he, affectionately known by Catholic and non-Catholic alike as Priest Gordon - the first parish priest for many a long year.  He would serve as the incumbent from 1799 until his death in 1855, working until his dying day for the poor and needy of Aberdeen.

Charles Gordon, Priest of Aberdeen

Priest Gordon was what we would call 'a couthy mannie'; born near Enzie in Banffshire, he spoke the broadest Doric to all and sundry.  He loved the poor, especially children, and used his vernacular charm to great effect in securing donations from those who could afford it to pay for the building of not only a new church in what was now named Chapel Court, but later for a school and orphanage which would become the forerunner of St Peter's R C School in King Street to this very day.

In 1803, having raised quarter of the money from his congregation, and the rest from his noble friends whom he believed 'The Blessed Virgin had laid it on their herts to gie to the chapel,' Priest Gordon had his prayers answered - High Mass was celebrated in the city for the first time since the Reformation.  A victory over prejudice and bigotry for this couthy mannie!

Replica of 'Our Lady of Good Success' - in St Peter's Chapel

Interior of St Peter's, Chapel Court

Chapel Court

Professor of Divinity, William Clark wrote a fine biography of Priest Gordon, demonstrating that although he loved his fellow man and woman, he did not suffer the reformers gladly!  Prof Clark recalls as a student listening to Fr Gordon denounce the Protestant leading lights of the Reformation:

Martin Luther and John Knox were held up to universal execration in the most delightful broad Scotch and with a vehemence that might have satisfied the Grand Inquisitor. Occasionally these attacks produced bursts of merriment from his protestant hearers, and, if these became audible—which they sometimes did—the author was ejected by the sexton. 

Priest Gordon did not stop short of criticising the dead, he went for the living too!  He was often heard to be sparring verbally with Church of Scotland minister, Dr William Kidd, incumbent of the old Gilcomston Church in Summer Street (now empty, was the former Denburn CofS).  Local Catholic historian, Monsignor Sandy MacWilliam reports:

Once they were discussing the doctrine of Purgatory. Dr. Kidd declared it preposterous, a mere figment of the ecclesiastical imagination, having no place in scripture and so on—’Weel’, said the priest, ‘a’ I hiv tae say, Doctor is that we can gang farrer and fare waur!’

But the 'crowning act of his life' according to Monsignor MacWilliam, was the school.  Priest Gordon took on the challenge of education in 1831 after the death of James Barclay, one of his congregation, who had been teaching Catholic children in a small school in Longacre, on the ancient lands of the Greyfriars.  The school, which had two wings added to the original plan to serve as an orphanage, was again funded by the most generous donations of friends and parishioners alike.

Exterior, Original St Peter's School, Constitution Street

Priest Gordon lived at the school as he got older, but still worked on with a powerful spirit which inspired such confidence in the serving bishop, that they left him to it, perhaps a little feart that his vitriolic rhetoric reserved for Tyndale and Zwingli might easily by turned on them at a moment's notice!  Bishop Kyle finally persuaded Father Charles to retire in 1854, but that was the end, unable to work for his parish, he gave up the ghost - the beloved Priest was dead by 1855.

Charles Gordon was 84 years old at his death!  Yet his work was his testament, he never boasted of his achievements, they spoke volumes for this country priest.  His funeral procession was said to stretch from Justice Street all the way to the Snow Kirkyard in Old Aberdeen, and  people were still joining it as he was laid in the same grave as his brother and uncle who had passed away sixty years before.  What a triumph that this kindly soul whose faith was of the most practical kind, that he should be buried in what had been Bishop Elphinstone's parish church, St Mary ad Nives, built in 1498 for the ordinary folk of his new university town.  Like him, Elphinstone was a man away ahead of his time, offering medicine as a subject alongside the traditional vocations of law and divinity before any other university in Scotland, and full of encouragement for learning and development.  Although the reformers Priest Gordon despised had enticed the politic Dr William Guild into destroying the Snow Kirk to show his 'support' for the Covenant, the Catholics of the city eventually had the ruin reconsecrated as a cemetery for their own.

Tomb of Priest Gordon, Bishops John Grant and John Geddes et al

Priest Gordon and his family have the tabletop tomb in the centre of the Snow Kirkyard, and below them, the ancient grave of Sir Gilbert Menzies of Pitfodels, whose family had continued to support the work of their outlawed church long after the Reformation.  The last of their line, John of Pitfodels, gave his house to be used as a Catholic Seminary.  Priest Gordon aided John Menzies in converting the house for its new purpose from 1827 - we know it today as Blairs, in use from the mid-19th century until 1984.

Detail of Latin inscription on Charles Gordon's gravestone

Priest Gordon has a better monument - the modern day descendant of his school in King Street, where stands his statue in the garden.  He is dressed in his priestly robes, his hands together in an attitude of prayer.  I'd like to think he was ever thanking the Almighty and the Blessed Virgin for that couthy, kindly charm of his which inspired so many to fund his charitable works.

Priest Gordon's Statue, outside St Peter's RC School, King Street

The Bridge That Flitted

It's hard to believe that 150 years ago there was no Rosemount Viaduct, and the famous trio of buildings, Education, Salvation and Damnation, aka the Central Library, St Mark's Church and His Majesty's Theatre, had not even been thought of.  The much-maligned Union Terrace Gardens had not even been planted out!  The west bank of the Denburn Valley was a wooded slope nicknamed the Corbie Haugh after the abundance of crows, rooks and other corvid species which nested there.  Centuries further back, visiting merchants and traders left their horses and ponies to graze in the Corbie Haugh, content in the knowledge that the Blackfriars of Schoolhill had a grand view of the copse and any attempt to interfere with these beasts could be swiftly dealt with.

Fast forward to early Victorian Aberdeen - the east bank of the river is dominated by the community of Mutton Brae.  A tiny hamlet with its own internal streets, shops and access to the 'Cathedral of the Disruption', i.e. the Triple Kirks, Mutton Brae was the home of Mary Slessor, who would eventually become the beloved surrogate mother to many poor foreign orphans when she went to Calabar as a Christian missionary.  Mary recalled her life in the shadow of the great kirk and the swift-flowing Denburn; still in the open, the river was prone to spring floods, and had in its time destroyed Andrew Jameson's double-arch bridge and the old Spa Well in its fury.  The banks of the Denburn were used by the folk of Mutton Brae, Denburn Terrace and Black's Buildings as bleach greens.  The drying poles were sometimes pulled down by the force of the flooding water on what Mary described as 'fast days'.

1867 OS Map - copyright National Library of Scotland

To access the bleach greens, the folk would cross the Mutton Brae footbridge down into the valley.  This is the bridge we concern ourselves with today - before the new Rosemount Viaduct was built, and even before Rosemount Place was laid out, the crossing over the railway was via this little bridge.  Stone arches decorated with intricate wrought iron trellis panels carried the walkway down into the valley, but not over the river, there was another footbridge nearer the new Union Bridge for that purpose.

the Old Mutton Brae footbridge - with Black's Buildings and Woolmanhill behind -
image copyright Ron Winram/ Andrew Cluer (Walkin' the Mat)

The bleach green would have been a site for work and gossip - the local wifies catching up with their neighbours' doings and casting aspersions on the cleanliness of folk's washing!  The bairns meanwhile could play in the wide open space, perhaps paddle at the edge of the river on a slow day, and enjoy a cup of fresh mineral water from the Corbie Well.  This other lost inhabitant of the Denburn Valley stood near to its present site, the remains of which are hidden by a council planter at the foot of the garden steps below HMT today.  The well was decorated with other reminders from Aberdeen's past, a lampost from the old Bow Brig of 1747; a weather vane and fragment of the great bell 'Auld Lowrie' from St Nicholas Kirk, both of which were casualties of the spire crashing to the ground in the fire of 1874.  It had a lion's head over the tap and a bowl to catch the water.  Two iron cups were suspended from chains attached to the top of the well house.

Copyright unknown but acknowledged to the original bearer

In those days, Skene Street and Skene Terrace terminated at Black's Buildings, nearest Schoolhill, and the street layout looked entirely different.  There were still tenements and shops all along Blackfriars Street, which would later be swept away when the new Cowdray Hall and War Memorial were built.  The council, never happy unless aping their grander neighbours in Edinburgh or Glasgow, decided to capitalise on the railway and build a more suitable viaduct.  With the new road, completed in 1883, they could create a new public library to satisfy the city's educational and literary needs.  The central library, originally a symmetrical construction was completed with a huge injection of cash from the famous Scots philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, in 1892, the same year that St. Mark's church was completed, being the congregation from the south part of the once single St Nicholas parish.  It was 1907 before the theatre came along and added to the now well-known trio on the viaduct.

By the start of 1890, Mutton Brae had been swept away in the name of progress, and along with it, the need for the little footbridge, as the new Rosemount Viaduct was connected to the new pleasure gardens of Union Terrace by a grand granite staircase.  The memories of the medieval valley were fading, and so the powers that be decided the footbridge was redundant, and by some strange miracle was transported - in a much shortened form - to Duthie Park and there it remains today as a bridge over the ornamental ponds.

High and Dry - no water flows under this bridge!

The Mutton Brae Bridge is still a stunning little feature, but the old ponds leave it high and dry, a monument to obsolescence.  Despite the fact of being 'flitted' and thus saved, the bridge looks bereft of purpose, and will continue to do so if the council do not spend some of their recent lottery grant on restoring the ponds in the park.  Miss Elizabeth Crombie Duthie would be horrified to know her gift of a green space to the city in memory of the male members of her family slain in conflict was so run down and depressed.  Even the tarmac on the pathways is cracked and neglected.  So, waken up people! Fix this park before you lose it too and someone takes a bucket of concrete to it!  This isn't so much the story of a bridge that flitted, but a reminder that maintenance of the remainders of our heritage is an on-going commitment, not something you do once and forget it.

Still in fine fettle, just a mite shorter than it used to be!!

Spare a thought for the Mutton Brae Bridge and its other architectural companions in Duthie Park, including the McGrigor monument (originally in Marischal College Quad), the Carden Haugh cistern house (from Carden House) and the Taylor drinking trough and fountain near the Winter Gardens (originally at the junction of Clifton Road and Great Northern Road), which have been 'flitted' from their original positions and detached from their original contexts.  We need to know where we come from, or how can we know where we're going?